Yeah right, drop the high prices on software and then complain when the jobs are being sent overseas to save money. Photoshop is a professional program, if you want cheap substitutions, then you have a bunch available.
Have you ever used it? People use Photoshop because it is such an amazing program. It can do everything conceivable to a photo, and then 100 things you didn't even think of. I think you're trying to compare Photoshop to windows. Windows is being threatened by Linux, but there is nothing in the open source bin that will even come close to Photoshop. I'm an avid Photoshop user because I use it for my work and everything else I've used pales in comparison. This is not windows, this is not preinstalled on every computer where people have little choice. This is a professional graphics program that is used by people who will pay for it because they feel that it is a fair price because it is their livelihood. They will not put their neck on the line supporting an open source clone of Photoshop while it's in development.
All Adobe is trying to do is prevent the rampant piracy of their software. Photoshop is very common among warez groups because it is easy to distribute. This is not evil Microsoft DRM; this is a company that makes one of the best graphics programs protecting their investment. And users will only upgrade if this program has many new features. I've used Photoshop 5 through 7 and I haven't found too many new features, but that's because they did such a good job in earlier versions. Another reason that this is not like windows is because people aren't forced to upgrade to get rid of all the bugs, they do it solely for the new features and better designed interface. I have said this in the past and I believe it more now, if Adobe would make Photoshop for Linux, you'd see hordes of people switching overnight.
And for god sakes!! This is not FUD! People can use Photoshop on Macs too, as it was originally developed for I believe. These people are not scared that embracing an open source alternative will send a lightning bolt from the heavens. They simply look at their job, how they make their living, what is currently available, and make the decision based on that. They could care less if hobbyists want to tinker around with something like GIMP; they care about what is the best product that is currently available.
If GIMP or some other clone of Photoshop exceeds the capabilities of Photoshop, then they'd probably switch. But don't expect them to switch to GIMP now and risk their livelihood based on political correctness.
I'm pretty sure they already do. I've seen advertisements that had a regular sized pda and a keypad displayed on the screen. But people want a smaller phone. I think this is just an awkward phase for this technology. People want small phones and full featured pda's with big screens. Buying one of these is a compromise that all you get in return is the convinience of having 1 device. If they could develop a technology that would allow a screen that could expand beyond the size of the pda, like digital paper, then that would be nice. But for now, these manufacturers will have to focus on satisfying both markets, the big nice usable pda, and the tiny smartphone with limited capabilities.
The linux people got FAT32 to work on Linux. Then MS comes out with with NTFS, as I remembered from when I tried to get linux to mount NTFS drives, it could only read them. There were things I could add to my linux to get it to write to NTFS, but the developers said to use them with caution. In a couple years, the linux people will figure it out and Linux and Windows will coexist better. But then this WinFS will come out. The linux people will have to go through the whole process. I'm not saying that WinFS will be just another buzz word, I'm sure it will work better than NTFS as NTFS works better than FAT32. But since when has microsoft been about making things work better that the average user wouldn't appriciate? They spent hundreds of millions on IE and WMP because a lot of people use those programs. But John H Computer user isn't going to make his buying decisions on the file system used. I think they're just doing this to lock out their competetitors, i.e. Linux. And they could also through some incredibly simple copywrite or encryption in it that offers no security, but allows them to use the DMCA as a shield against linux the people developing linux support for it.
you just told people how to circumvent something having to do with a computer! That's in violation of the DMCA. VMware's stock (I know they're private, humor?) just went down.004% and cost them millions which you must pay back.
What is involved in fixing a printer on windows? unplug it and plug it back in? I'm talking about installing it. There is nothing like plug and play. On the older windows, it was always iffy, but I've never had a problem plugging a printer, scanner, camera, or hard drive into usb or firewire and not have it work on win xp. So in that aspect, windows makes this easier.
I think most people would agree with you. Once the system is set up and all the hardware is set up, linux is just as easy to use as windows. When people talk about the difficulty using linux, I think they're referring to installation, hardware setup, installing new applications, and customizing the hardware they have set up. Go to best buy, buy and printer, and have those 8th graders try to set it up, then you'll see where the difficulty comes up. True, it's probably the printer manufacturer's fault, but even if they did support it well it wouldn't be as easy as in windows.
I agree with you on most things, but I still think WMP is a good, uncluttered, and easy to use media player. People say well what happens when you try to play a corrupt file? I redownload it, alright. I'm sorry to say this, but of all the media players I've seen, including xmms, mplayer, winamp, real one, music match jukebox (or whatever ever the hell it is) quicktime, and many others that were too stupid to remember did not have the clean interface of wmp, nor the ability to catagorize songs which means a LOT when you have 2000 mp3s spanning hundreds of artists and hundreds of albums.
Once they clone ms office and make it work better than the real thing, I think these programmers should clone and improve media player. And don't get all pissy because I said clone, these interfaces are not original, but their underlying code may be. Don't take it offensively.
This guys does have a point. Think about all the MS blaster chaos (I am not saying terrorism this time). So much of that could have been avoided if people understood that they could turn automatic updates on or click Windows Update from their start menus to patch their system. If they had some idea how to fix vulnerabilities on their computer, then that situation would have been much less of a problem and got much less attention.
But so they're fed up anyway, and they want an alternative. Hypothetically, they buy a computer preloaded with linux and set up with all the hardware and the software they want. The argument about the difficulty and time it takes to set the damn thing up is gone. However, what happens when they want to install some new software? They expect to be able to click, download, install, and run with no thinking involved. Now why avid linux users around here would like to read about the project on sourceforge, download the source code, go through line by line making sure it's okay to run, compile it, and then manually install it, no one else wants to do that. And if they do have RPM's available, they do not always work on every computer due to dependencies.
Now the only linux distros i've used are red hat, mandrake, and suse, so I have not used apt get. Everything I've heard of that does a lot to help this situation and I admit that I am ignorant on that so don't bother sending a response based on that.
I agree that people can see beauty in the second process of installing software, but that is because you appriciate it. The consumers of the software that open source programmers would use over ms software must spend more time making installation easier. Maybe that's why ms software is so popular, it may run like shit and crash, but at least it only takes a monkey to install it.
And programmers do not have to compromise their talent and respect for their own work by spending more time making installation easier. By making installation easier, then more people are willing to try it and give more feedback on how to improve it. If only a few geeks use a program and their feedback is only technical, then the project can slow down. But if the software is easy for a lot of eager people, but without programming experience, then they could give feedback on the design elements and how to make the program work better.
Most people who use computers aren't software engineers, but they can tell the difference of a well designed and a badly designed program. In order for linux to knock ms out of the water, programmers have to focus a lot on this.
I think a standard to install one piece of software is what we need. Linux advocates are always touting the benefits of standards, and this is the only glaring one I see. An alternative to creating the standard from scratch might be to adapt apt-get to make it more friendly, but again I've never used it so I'm just guessing on that.
When I was in high school, I worked at a small video rental store. We would always get dvd's of movies that had not yet come out on dvd yet. They did have the legal warnings every 15 minutes or so, but my point is that the distributers also send out a lot of dvd's before they come out.
Integrate SETI into KaZaA. People can get free music and find ET at the same time. Think of all those lost CPU cycles wasted on searching for Britney Spears. I just home the government doesn't go knocking on 12 year old's houses because their computer found the location of Elvis floating around in space.
Your first two points are correct, but that's because of microsoft. One of the goals of many linux advocates is to prevent one company from owning and controlling its distribution.
But you last 4 do have more merit. Software companies have to take a risk, big or small, to develop for linux and windows. When people consider changing sides to linux (for home use), the first concern they have is if they can use their existing software and the answer is usally no. There are free and open alternatives, but it is my opinion that they generally aren't as good. Now I'm sure many advocates don't agree with me, but I'm taking this from my own experiences of trying to switch many times. I think that WMP is a fucking awesome media player. None of the media players I found for linux could sort all the media and play all the video and audio formats that I use in one program. I don't like Winamp and so I don't like XMMS. And I didn't really like MPlayer either. I use ms word on windows, but I could probably do by with openoffice, but to me that would be settling with something I didn't think was as powerful or as usable. Mozilla never impressed me, but ironically I'm typing this on netscape which i do prefer more. IE6 is a good browser in my opinion and it has features that others in linux that I didn't find. A good example is the history feature in IE. Another huge missing program is photoshop. I love photoshop and gimp wasn't even close to it, in my opinion.
There are also other smaller programs like winzip, newsrover, mp3tagtools, aol IM, recordnow max that I use frequently that I could not find equal performing alternatives for linux.
Enough of that. Linux does have a voice, but the voice is clouded by people who do not have the frustrations as I do and love it. Sorry, but people tend not to listen to computer gurus when making software choices. That leads on to the fifth point of yours. I'm sorry, but the only people I know who use linux are computer science majors. Of course I've read about people touting that their grandmother uses linux and so everyone's grandmother should be using it, but I think that is a little far out of reach for my grandmother. And on to your last point, no advertising. It's a sad fact that in our society every product needs to have millions in advertising for people to buy it. I've never seen a comercial or advertisement in regular magazines for linux. And that's probably that linux companies don't have the billions to throw at it like microsoft does.
Everytime I say anything negative about linux I get flamed and called a FUD spreader. All I am saying are my personal experiences. If someone test drove a car and didn't like it, would that be spreading FUD if they told someone else how they didn't like it? No
So if i'm going to say all this "bad stuff" about linux, then I have to say something positive. I do think that linux has the ability to crack into the home user market as it has done so well in the server market. However, I think it needs some things upfront first. Distros for the desktop need to look the same. People can still have their gentoo's and debians, but I think that people who are switching need to have that safety net of knowing each distro will look the same so as not to confuse them. Is this possible, I'm not sure. Does this undermind the beauty of linux? Maybe for the experts who love the custimization of it, but better for the newbies. I also think that packages should work the same for each distro. A company shouldn't have to make rpms for mandrake, suse, and redhat. Software companies would love to deal with an open operating system, but linux has become the generic name for many many distros. I'm not expecting everyone to agree with me here, but these are my views based on real experiences on the subject and I wish that this time they will be respected and not flamed for my "anti-linux" fud rhetoric propaganda.
I'm not sure if that's completely correct. The WMV format might have these restrictions. I downloaded one of them once and I couldn't move the file out of the folder i originally downloaded it to. Windows would not let me move it no matter what. I've also downloaded wma's and when I go to play them windows media player says I don't have the license for them or something. You may be right and I may be wrong, but I have seen restrictions associated with these formats.
At my school, they put up a firewall that blocks all p2p software from connecting to outside networks. That is why we had to resort to using a local Direct Connect hub that allowed easy file trading among the students. The good part was it was very fast at 800 kbytes/sec. The bad part was the limited selection of songs.
Once they push windows on the computers, america's favorite idiots Monica and Chandler will be shown updating and patching their machines before the next big "email" worm comes. The chainsmoking monkeys at their typewriters over at NBC could easily make a show about those wacky windows boxes.
Hacking, in this criminal sense, is just as bad as breaking into a building and looking through desks and file cabnets. Hacking isn't about curiosity, it's about intrusion. And people know that when they break into a computer system they're not supposed to be looking at they are commiting a crime. The argument that companies allowed the break in because there security wasn't tough enough is bullshit too. Like if I investigate it enough, I could probably break into a bank or other corporation.
There should be stiffer penalties for hacking if it is not deterring people from committing this crime. This blaster worm shut down a lot of systems including 911 and other emergency response. This is terrorism. Maybe these new penalties are a little high if you can rape someone and get less jail time, but it is wrong to write these viruses and spread them around.
And just because Microsoft makes it easy for people to write these programs, doesn't put all the blame on them. Microsoft needs to make operating systems that have some ounce of security. But then again, when I go to home depot to buy a door, I don't blame them if someone breaks into my house and left the faucets running.
It's up to everyone to tackle this problem. Microsoft needs to up the security. Users need to wake up and apply software patches, and the courts need to deter people from writing viruses that cause all this havoc by setting stiffer penalties.
We are in a time where it takes a couple minutes to do research on google. Whether it's researching a major paper or just answering a question that's been floating around in your head for a while, the internet has become an easy way to find any information without driving to the library. I guess I am a child of the information age in that since sixth grade I've used the internet to help in research papers for school. I'm in college now and I still use them. The good part is that's easy to find information about a topic, but the bad part is that no academic body has approved the material.
Years ago, librarians would scare us into thinking that everything we found on the internet was a blatant lie trying to trick us...I'm not joking. But after years of using the internet for school work, I've found that it does take a little common sense in determining if a web site is reliable or not, but it's mostly common sense.
The point I'm trying to make is that the internet is a powerful research tool. Newspapers online are common for even small local papers. However, there is so much crap online that we need to have the common sense to distinguish it from the real stuff. Most people who have used the internet for years are used to this, but newbies are not. It is up to the educated to make it aware to people that the internet has many resources, some of which are bullshit, but most of which are good.
The standard is based on pixels. In the case of a moderately high screen resolution, it craps up. I'm sure when the powers that be were developing this standard, they had their best intentions in mind. However, in practicality, basing standards on pixels and not something like font size or percentages, can cause things to look bad at high resolutions.
Think of macromedia flash, no matter what you do, it can be scaled to fit any screen resolution. All I am saying is that this standard might behave badly because it can not be adjusted by the user to compensate for their resolution.
I've always done web pages based on screen percentages and not exact pixels for these reasons. And just because it's a standard, does not mean it's the best way do to do things
If you still think I'm wrong and think FUD is my problem, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree. All I know is what I see, and when I see these pages, it annoys me.
No, this is NOT FUD. Jesus! How am I fearful, uncertain, or doubtful??? This is a standard that pisses me off because I can not read the text. Maybe it is a flaw in the browser, maybe it's not. All I know is that I am sure I am not the only person who has this problem and people should take it into consideration. The parent asked what standards he should or should not incorporate, and I said not this one. I hate where every response is fucking FUD when it does not apply. Maybe it's FUD that prevents people from posting comments that have meaning without using tired buzz words.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy is 100% correct.
Yeah right, drop the high prices on software and then complain when the jobs are being sent overseas to save money. Photoshop is a professional program, if you want cheap substitutions, then you have a bunch available.
Have you ever used it? People use Photoshop because it is such an amazing program. It can do everything conceivable to a photo, and then 100 things you didn't even think of. I think you're trying to compare Photoshop to windows. Windows is being threatened by Linux, but there is nothing in the open source bin that will even come close to Photoshop. I'm an avid Photoshop user because I use it for my work and everything else I've used pales in comparison. This is not windows, this is not preinstalled on every computer where people have little choice. This is a professional graphics program that is used by people who will pay for it because they feel that it is a fair price because it is their livelihood. They will not put their neck on the line supporting an open source clone of Photoshop while it's in development.
All Adobe is trying to do is prevent the rampant piracy of their software. Photoshop is very common among warez groups because it is easy to distribute. This is not evil Microsoft DRM; this is a company that makes one of the best graphics programs protecting their investment. And users will only upgrade if this program has many new features. I've used Photoshop 5 through 7 and I haven't found too many new features, but that's because they did such a good job in earlier versions. Another reason that this is not like windows is because people aren't forced to upgrade to get rid of all the bugs, they do it solely for the new features and better designed interface. I have said this in the past and I believe it more now, if Adobe would make Photoshop for Linux, you'd see hordes of people switching overnight.
And for god sakes!! This is not FUD! People can use Photoshop on Macs too, as it was originally developed for I believe. These people are not scared that embracing an open source alternative will send a lightning bolt from the heavens. They simply look at their job, how they make their living, what is currently available, and make the decision based on that. They could care less if hobbyists want to tinker around with something like GIMP; they care about what is the best product that is currently available.
If GIMP or some other clone of Photoshop exceeds the capabilities of Photoshop, then they'd probably switch. But don't expect them to switch to GIMP now and risk their livelihood based on political correctness.
I'm pretty sure they already do. I've seen advertisements that had a regular sized pda and a keypad displayed on the screen. But people want a smaller phone. I think this is just an awkward phase for this technology. People want small phones and full featured pda's with big screens. Buying one of these is a compromise that all you get in return is the convinience of having 1 device. If they could develop a technology that would allow a screen that could expand beyond the size of the pda, like digital paper, then that would be nice. But for now, these manufacturers will have to focus on satisfying both markets, the big nice usable pda, and the tiny smartphone with limited capabilities.
The linux people got FAT32 to work on Linux. Then MS comes out with with NTFS, as I remembered from when I tried to get linux to mount NTFS drives, it could only read them. There were things I could add to my linux to get it to write to NTFS, but the developers said to use them with caution. In a couple years, the linux people will figure it out and Linux and Windows will coexist better. But then this WinFS will come out. The linux people will have to go through the whole process. I'm not saying that WinFS will be just another buzz word, I'm sure it will work better than NTFS as NTFS works better than FAT32. But since when has microsoft been about making things work better that the average user wouldn't appriciate? They spent hundreds of millions on IE and WMP because a lot of people use those programs. But John H Computer user isn't going to make his buying decisions on the file system used. I think they're just doing this to lock out their competetitors, i.e. Linux. And they could also through some incredibly simple copywrite or encryption in it that offers no security, but allows them to use the DMCA as a shield against linux the people developing linux support for it.
you just told people how to circumvent something having to do with a computer! That's in violation of the DMCA. VMware's stock (I know they're private, humor?) just went down .004% and cost them millions which you must pay back.
"See the sun, it's bad. Blow it up. A flag, with skull and crossbones is bad too."
Here they say that Sun Microsystems is bad and software piracy is bad!
I've done it again!
Don't disrespect the guiness.
What is involved in fixing a printer on windows? unplug it and plug it back in? I'm talking about installing it. There is nothing like plug and play. On the older windows, it was always iffy, but I've never had a problem plugging a printer, scanner, camera, or hard drive into usb or firewire and not have it work on win xp. So in that aspect, windows makes this easier.
I think most people would agree with you. Once the system is set up and all the hardware is set up, linux is just as easy to use as windows. When people talk about the difficulty using linux, I think they're referring to installation, hardware setup, installing new applications, and customizing the hardware they have set up. Go to best buy, buy and printer, and have those 8th graders try to set it up, then you'll see where the difficulty comes up. True, it's probably the printer manufacturer's fault, but even if they did support it well it wouldn't be as easy as in windows.
I agree with you on most things, but I still think WMP is a good, uncluttered, and easy to use media player. People say well what happens when you try to play a corrupt file? I redownload it, alright. I'm sorry to say this, but of all the media players I've seen, including xmms, mplayer, winamp, real one, music match jukebox (or whatever ever the hell it is) quicktime, and many others that were too stupid to remember did not have the clean interface of wmp, nor the ability to catagorize songs which means a LOT when you have 2000 mp3s spanning hundreds of artists and hundreds of albums.
Once they clone ms office and make it work better than the real thing, I think these programmers should clone and improve media player. And don't get all pissy because I said clone, these interfaces are not original, but their underlying code may be. Don't take it offensively.
This guys does have a point. Think about all the MS blaster chaos (I am not saying terrorism this time). So much of that could have been avoided if people understood that they could turn automatic updates on or click Windows Update from their start menus to patch their system. If they had some idea how to fix vulnerabilities on their computer, then that situation would have been much less of a problem and got much less attention.
But so they're fed up anyway, and they want an alternative. Hypothetically, they buy a computer preloaded with linux and set up with all the hardware and the software they want. The argument about the difficulty and time it takes to set the damn thing up is gone. However, what happens when they want to install some new software? They expect to be able to click, download, install, and run with no thinking involved. Now why avid linux users around here would like to read about the project on sourceforge, download the source code, go through line by line making sure it's okay to run, compile it, and then manually install it, no one else wants to do that. And if they do have RPM's available, they do not always work on every computer due to dependencies.
Now the only linux distros i've used are red hat, mandrake, and suse, so I have not used apt get. Everything I've heard of that does a lot to help this situation and I admit that I am ignorant on that so don't bother sending a response based on that.
I agree that people can see beauty in the second process of installing software, but that is because you appriciate it. The consumers of the software that open source programmers would use over ms software must spend more time making installation easier. Maybe that's why ms software is so popular, it may run like shit and crash, but at least it only takes a monkey to install it.
And programmers do not have to compromise their talent and respect for their own work by spending more time making installation easier. By making installation easier, then more people are willing to try it and give more feedback on how to improve it. If only a few geeks use a program and their feedback is only technical, then the project can slow down. But if the software is easy for a lot of eager people, but without programming experience, then they could give feedback on the design elements and how to make the program work better.
Most people who use computers aren't software engineers, but they can tell the difference of a well designed and a badly designed program. In order for linux to knock ms out of the water, programmers have to focus a lot on this.
I think a standard to install one piece of software is what we need. Linux advocates are always touting the benefits of standards, and this is the only glaring one I see. An alternative to creating the standard from scratch might be to adapt apt-get to make it more friendly, but again I've never used it so I'm just guessing on that.
When I was in high school, I worked at a small video rental store. We would always get dvd's of movies that had not yet come out on dvd yet. They did have the legal warnings every 15 minutes or so, but my point is that the distributers also send out a lot of dvd's before they come out.
Integrate SETI into KaZaA. People can get free music and find ET at the same time. Think of all those lost CPU cycles wasted on searching for Britney Spears. I just home the government doesn't go knocking on 12 year old's houses because their computer found the location of Elvis floating around in space.
Why not just use windows? Plug and Play baby!
Your first two points are correct, but that's because of microsoft. One of the goals of many linux advocates is to prevent one company from owning and controlling its distribution.
But you last 4 do have more merit. Software companies have to take a risk, big or small, to develop for linux and windows. When people consider changing sides to linux (for home use), the first concern they have is if they can use their existing software and the answer is usally no. There are free and open alternatives, but it is my opinion that they generally aren't as good. Now I'm sure many advocates don't agree with me, but I'm taking this from my own experiences of trying to switch many times. I think that WMP is a fucking awesome media player. None of the media players I found for linux could sort all the media and play all the video and audio formats that I use in one program. I don't like Winamp and so I don't like XMMS. And I didn't really like MPlayer either. I use ms word on windows, but I could probably do by with openoffice, but to me that would be settling with something I didn't think was as powerful or as usable. Mozilla never impressed me, but ironically I'm typing this on netscape which i do prefer more. IE6 is a good browser in my opinion and it has features that others in linux that I didn't find. A good example is the history feature in IE. Another huge missing program is photoshop. I love photoshop and gimp wasn't even close to it, in my opinion.
There are also other smaller programs like winzip, newsrover, mp3tagtools, aol IM, recordnow max that I use frequently that I could not find equal performing alternatives for linux.
Enough of that. Linux does have a voice, but the voice is clouded by people who do not have the frustrations as I do and love it. Sorry, but people tend not to listen to computer gurus when making software choices. That leads on to the fifth point of yours. I'm sorry, but the only people I know who use linux are computer science majors. Of course I've read about people touting that their grandmother uses linux and so everyone's grandmother should be using it, but I think that is a little far out of reach for my grandmother. And on to your last point, no advertising. It's a sad fact that in our society every product needs to have millions in advertising for people to buy it. I've never seen a comercial or advertisement in regular magazines for linux. And that's probably that linux companies don't have the billions to throw at it like microsoft does.
Everytime I say anything negative about linux I get flamed and called a FUD spreader. All I am saying are my personal experiences. If someone test drove a car and didn't like it, would that be spreading FUD if they told someone else how they didn't like it? No
So if i'm going to say all this "bad stuff" about linux, then I have to say something positive. I do think that linux has the ability to crack into the home user market as it has done so well in the server market. However, I think it needs some things upfront first. Distros for the desktop need to look the same. People can still have their gentoo's and debians, but I think that people who are switching need to have that safety net of knowing each distro will look the same so as not to confuse them. Is this possible, I'm not sure. Does this undermind the beauty of linux? Maybe for the experts who love the custimization of it, but better for the newbies. I also think that packages should work the same for each distro. A company shouldn't have to make rpms for mandrake, suse, and redhat. Software companies would love to deal with an open operating system, but linux has become the generic name for many many distros. I'm not expecting everyone to agree with me here, but these are my views based on real experiences on the subject and I wish that this time they will be respected and not flamed for my "anti-linux" fud rhetoric propaganda.
I'm not sure if that's completely correct. The WMV format might have these restrictions. I downloaded one of them once and I couldn't move the file out of the folder i originally downloaded it to. Windows would not let me move it no matter what. I've also downloaded wma's and when I go to play them windows media player says I don't have the license for them or something. You may be right and I may be wrong, but I have seen restrictions associated with these formats.
At my school, they put up a firewall that blocks all p2p software from connecting to outside networks. That is why we had to resort to using a local Direct Connect hub that allowed easy file trading among the students. The good part was it was very fast at 800 kbytes/sec. The bad part was the limited selection of songs.
Once they push windows on the computers, america's favorite idiots Monica and Chandler will be shown updating and patching their machines before the next big "email" worm comes. The chainsmoking monkeys at their typewriters over at NBC could easily make a show about those wacky windows boxes.
Alright I'll give you that. Maybe using terrorism is a bit much for this, I'll refer to it as unwanted chaos that costs people time and money.
Hacking, in this criminal sense, is just as bad as breaking into a building and looking through desks and file cabnets. Hacking isn't about curiosity, it's about intrusion. And people know that when they break into a computer system they're not supposed to be looking at they are commiting a crime. The argument that companies allowed the break in because there security wasn't tough enough is bullshit too. Like if I investigate it enough, I could probably break into a bank or other corporation.
There should be stiffer penalties for hacking if it is not deterring people from committing this crime. This blaster worm shut down a lot of systems including 911 and other emergency response. This is terrorism. Maybe these new penalties are a little high if you can rape someone and get less jail time, but it is wrong to write these viruses and spread them around.
And just because Microsoft makes it easy for people to write these programs, doesn't put all the blame on them. Microsoft needs to make operating systems that have some ounce of security. But then again, when I go to home depot to buy a door, I don't blame them if someone breaks into my house and left the faucets running.
It's up to everyone to tackle this problem. Microsoft needs to up the security. Users need to wake up and apply software patches, and the courts need to deter people from writing viruses that cause all this havoc by setting stiffer penalties.
We are in a time where it takes a couple minutes to do research on google. Whether it's researching a major paper or just answering a question that's been floating around in your head for a while, the internet has become an easy way to find any information without driving to the library. I guess I am a child of the information age in that since sixth grade I've used the internet to help in research papers for school. I'm in college now and I still use them. The good part is that's easy to find information about a topic, but the bad part is that no academic body has approved the material.
Years ago, librarians would scare us into thinking that everything we found on the internet was a blatant lie trying to trick us...I'm not joking. But after years of using the internet for school work, I've found that it does take a little common sense in determining if a web site is reliable or not, but it's mostly common sense.
The point I'm trying to make is that the internet is a powerful research tool. Newspapers online are common for even small local papers. However, there is so much crap online that we need to have the common sense to distinguish it from the real stuff. Most people who have used the internet for years are used to this, but newbies are not. It is up to the educated to make it aware to people that the internet has many resources, some of which are bullshit, but most of which are good.
The standard is based on pixels. In the case of a moderately high screen resolution, it craps up. I'm sure when the powers that be were developing this standard, they had their best intentions in mind. However, in practicality, basing standards on pixels and not something like font size or percentages, can cause things to look bad at high resolutions.
Think of macromedia flash, no matter what you do, it can be scaled to fit any screen resolution. All I am saying is that this standard might behave badly because it can not be adjusted by the user to compensate for their resolution.
I've always done web pages based on screen percentages and not exact pixels for these reasons. And just because it's a standard, does not mean it's the best way do to do things
If you still think I'm wrong and think FUD is my problem, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree. All I know is what I see, and when I see these pages, it annoys me.
I've checked this is IE 6 and Netscape 7.1 and they both do it. So I don't think this is a bug in the browser.
No, this is NOT FUD. Jesus! How am I fearful, uncertain, or doubtful??? This is a standard that pisses me off because I can not read the text. Maybe it is a flaw in the browser, maybe it's not. All I know is that I am sure I am not the only person who has this problem and people should take it into consideration. The parent asked what standards he should or should not incorporate, and I said not this one. I hate where every response is fucking FUD when it does not apply. Maybe it's FUD that prevents people from posting comments that have meaning without using tired buzz words.